Ii6 • Seven Years in Central Africa. [Oct. 
his neighbour's brother. Here they live to bite and devour 
one another. The most trivial mistake or breach of etiquette is 
a crime, and has to be paid for dearly. A man who accidentally 
knocked over a small pot of fat was fined thirty shillings' worth 
of beeswax. A stranger passing through the country is liable to 
be entrapped into paying heavy fines. If a slave steals, say 
a few ears of corn out of a garden, he is seized, and if not 
redeemed by his master's paying a large compensation, he is 
at once sold. 
FUNERAL CEREMONIES. 
Death is surrounded by many strange and absurd superstitions. 
It is considered essential that a man should die in his own 
country, if not in his own town. On the way to Bailundu, 
shortly after leaving Bihe territory, I met some men running 
at great speed, carrying a sick man tied to a pole, in order that he 
might die in his own country. I tried to stop them, but they 
were running as fast as their burden would allow them down 
a steep rocky hill. By the sick man's convulsive movements 
I could see that he was in great pain, perhaps in his death throes, 
hence the great haste. If a Bailundu man dies in Bihe, the 
I Bihe people have to pay the Bailundu heavily for the shameful 
conduct of the Bihe demons in killing a stranger, and vice versa. 
When a man dies at home his body is placed on a rude table, 
and his friends meet for days round the corpse, drinking, eating, 
shouting, and singing, until the body begins actually to fall to 
pieces. Then the body is tied in a faggot of poles and carried 
on men's shoulders up and down some open space, followed 
by doctors and drummers. The doctors demand of the dead 
man the cause of his death, whether by poison or witchcraft, and 
if by the latter, who was the witch ^ Most of the deaths I have 
known of in negro-land were from pulmonary diseases, but all 
were set down to witchcraft. The jerking of the bier to and fro, 
causing the men bearing it to stumble hither and thither, is taken 
as the dead man's answer ; thus, as in the case of spirit-rapping 
at home, the reply is spelled out. The result of this enquiry is 
implicitly believed in, and, if the case demands it, the witch is 
drowned. 
There might be some reason for their superstition if the dead 
body were laid upon the ground and allowed to jerk itself; but 
